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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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Nicholas Tsoulfanidis—ANS member since 1969
We welcome ANS members who have careered in the community to submit their own Nuclear Legacy stories, so that the personal history of nuclear power can be captured. For information on submitting your stories, contact nucnews@ans.org.
As an undergraduate I studied physics at the University of Athens. I entered the university in 1955 after successfully passing a national exam (came up fourth in a field of about 700 candidates). Upon graduation and finishing my mandatory two-year military service, the plan was to teach physics either in a public high school or as a tutor for a private for-profit institution, preparing high school students for the national exam.
Chad L. Pope, Colby B. Jensen, Douglas M. Gerstner, James R. Parry
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 10 | October 2019 | Pages 1378-1386
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1599615
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) facility was designed and built in the late 1950s. The air-cooled reactor design incorporates fuel composed of highly enriched uranium dispersed in graphite with a 10 000:1 carbon-to-uranium atom ratio to provide a very fast-acting highly negative temperature coefficient of reactivity. The reactor utilizes a forced-air-cooling system for decay heat removal, with a primary function of reducing the time at temperature (oxidation) of the reactor fuel cladding. The simple design with lack of a cooling system pressure boundary provides relatively easy access for instrumentation and experiments. The large thermal mass of the reactor and the simple design allow for high-power transients approaching 18 000 MW in an inherently safe manner. The simple design has allowed TREAT to operate successfully for 35 years before being placed in standby in 1994 and subsequently restarted in 2017 after more than 20 years of standby to continue the transient fuel testing mission in the United States. This technical note addresses the reactor design and experiment capabilities.